The play’s the thing for former ski
racer Alex Cranmer BY BRYCE HUBNER

Friends, skiers, countrymen, lend me your ears: Lindsey Vonn is not the only
national team ski racer who’s acted in the “Law & Order” franchise.

Meet former British ski team member Alex Cranmer, an American-born alpine racer
who, in addition to playing villains on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Law
& Order: Criminal Intent,” has spent more than a decade acting coveted roles on
stages and screens around the world.

“I [cut my teeth in amateur and professional] theater throughout college and grad
school,” says Cranmer, a Burke Mountain Academy and Middlebury College ski team
alum. “But the thrust of my career since has largely been in guest starring, co-starring
and supporting roles on television dramas. I’ll be a guest star, for example, on ‘Law &
Order’ or ‘CSI: NY’ — playing a bad guy who appears throughout an episode.”
Most recently, Cranmer wrapped shooting a gig with Steve Buscemi on HBO’s
“Boardwalk Empire,” which returns to television this fall on Sept. 25. He also notched
a substantive part in the upcoming film “Movie 43,” a series of comedy sketches that
features just about every A-List actor in Hollywood — from Kate Winslet and Naomi
Watts to Gerard Butler and Hugh Jackman.
If all the world’s a stage in the seven ages of man, the 36-year-old Cranmer, a married father of one, is probably acting a part in the middle. But this tale of ski-racer-turned-actor starts, in Shakespeare’s words, with a “schoolboy with his satchel ...
creeping like [a] snail.”
“When I first started ski racing, I was really slow,” Cranmer says. “I mean, I was terrible. I’d only just learned how to ski, and I think I got last in every race the first couple
years. But I loved it. And I stayed with it.”
Cranmer caught the skiing and racing bug from his older half-brother, Danny Clayton, who competed for a local high school near their hometown of Summit, N.J.